November 6, 2014
Through Twitter and Facebook, we asked on Election Day whether or not you took a certain exit poll at your precinct. Apparently 1000 South Carolina voters did.
As we expected after hearing some of the questions, many respondents expressed strong feelings about the racially-charged perception of the survey. A number of those people contacted Greenville-Spartanburg CBS affiliate WSPA to let them know, too.
Clemson professor Dr. David Woodard and his partner in the study USC doctoral candidate Paul White said their research was to examine voter attitudes during the election of Senator Tim Scott and that the questions asked have been used for decades to determine if white voters would vote for a black candidate.
White said, “South Carolina is the vanguard of political science. We’re on the cutting edge of all the big changes that are going to happen nationally. Generally the precursors are found in South Carolina politics.”
Sometimes research is designed to elicit a strong response and dig in to the human psyche to force people to admit truths about themselves that they may not otherwise do.
Understanding human behavior and finding out “what makes people tick” is an approach frequently applied by marketers when they ask controversial questions with limited response ranges, but in this case Woodard indicated surprise at the backlash. He told WSPA, “We do this every day. We didn’t think too much about it until we got it out in the field and saw that there was some reaction.”
White noted, “You had liberals getting offended. You had conservatives getting offended. It was all over the place.”
WSPA’s Dave Jordan said that White and Woodard plan to publish their results in a paper scheduled for a January 2015 release.
Did you take the survey? If so, what were your thoughts about it? Let us know HERE. We’re interested in research, too.
